


the mysterious case of the talusitis

by blueparacosm



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Character Study?, Chill Fic, Deviates From Canon, Fluff, Gay, M/M, Mentions of Violence, Murphy is a Little Shit, Not as angsty as it sounds, OCD, Strong Language, brief mention of abuse, canonverse, card game fluff, humor?, medical apprentice murphy, murphy's losing it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-19
Updated: 2017-03-19
Packaged: 2018-10-08 01:44:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,767
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10375089
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blueparacosm/pseuds/blueparacosm
Summary: And all that Bellamy has to think about is spades, diamonds, clubs and hearts, and the feeling of Murphy’s frost-coated hands underneath his. Surely Atlas could put the world down for a bit of fun.





	

**Author's Note:**

> this is lame

    It’s 16:00 when Bellamy’s hands find the cool metal of the medical wing’s entry door. It’s 16:01 when he stumbles to a bed, lowers himself onto the end of it. It’s still 16:01 when he realizes the only other body in the well-sterilized, gray expanse is the silhouette dozing by the window, melted into a puddle of pale skin and dull fabric, fast asleep in the pooling afternoon sunlight like a housecat. It’s 16:02 when he stops staring, clears his throat hard enough to dry his mouth like he’s hung his tongue on a clothing line. The dark shape snoring at the workbench startles awake, sputtering “I’m workin’! I’m workin’!”

Bellamy recognizes the high, rasping voice as none other than the camp’s favorite cockroach and newest medical apprentice. Emphasis on “apprentice”, he thinks, as Murphy croaks to life and and busies his hands with a rag reeking of rubbing alcohol and a glimmering pair of forceps, which he’s cleaned now enough times for the instrument to have crossed over from their current dimension to an untouched plane of purity and blinding light. Needless to say- the kid’s on autopilot.

“Murphy? Little help here,” Bellamy calls, and Murphy jumps in his seat.

“Oh, shit, sorry. Didn’t see you there,” he mumbles, face flattening out into something a bit more familiar and significantly less expressive. He meanders through wheeled carts and stray I.V. poles with a clipboard in a white-knuckle grip and an uncapped pen perched atop his ear, and Bellamy stifles a laugh at the irony of it all. Murphy, renowned animal-person-hybrid, soon-to-be healthcare specialist. “What’s up, Guardsman?” he says, low and teasing, and Bellamy can’t help but roll his eyes, nerves calming in the way that only the sight of the pale kid’s languid smile and loose limbs can inspire.

“Did something to my ankle here--” he starts, reaching down to untie his boot, which Murphy plucks from the ground and puts neatly aside, and Bellamy rolls up his pants leg to give him a better look at the damage. The boy lets out an impressed whistle as the older man reveals a patchwork of bruises on a swollen ankle, and scribbles something onto his clipboard, slowly and with knitted brows. “I thought you couldn’t read?”

Murphy quirks an eyebrow at him, tongue peeking from between his lips as he turns the board to face Bellamy, reveals a picture of what looks like a socked foot ballooning up to a comical size at the ankle. Below it he’s written, “Belumy Blake.” Bellamy gives him an amused, questioning look, to which Murphy responds with an easy-going shrug, abruptly rising and weaving through the obstacle course of a hospital back to his cluttered workbench, only stopping to hiss “Fuck you,” at a misplaced wheeled cart that attacks his hipbone as he passes by it.

“You could really use a janitor down here,” Bellamy muses, fingers trailing absently over the violet fireworks painting his anklebone.

The boy snorts, pausing his mission of collecting supplies. “Yeah, well, we had one ‘til he went and shot the big man,” Murphy says, looking pointedly at Bellamy, who decides after a moment of hesitation that Jaha isn’t actually dead, so he’s allowed to think it’s funny.

He finds a lot of things about Murphy funny.

The boy travels back and swings a short stool to the edge of the bed, settling atop it and uncharacteristically gently gathering Bellamy’s left leg into the air, and rests the man’s socked foot on his thigh without asking for permission. The injured man watches with vague interest as a sliver of pink slips past Murphy’s lips again, as if he can only focus if his tongue is trapped between his teeth like captured prey.

“Thanks” Bellamy says in advance, as he unrolls gauze for what will likely be a makeshift compression wrap and snaps a piece of adhesive tape from its roll with his free hand, the sharp sound echoing through the eerily silent room. Murphy hums, thumb smoothing down the tape on Bellamy’s ankle as he pins the gauze underneath it.

“Just doin’ my job,” he offers, steady voice faltering strangely. Bellamy chooses to ignore it, for now. Puts it away for later as he becomes mesmerized by the spiral movement of Murphy’s hand guiding the gauze around and around and around his ankle. He’s dazed off by the monotony, before Murphy’s quick, fluid movements direct their attention elsewhere and drag him back to the correct plane of time and space, never letting him wander too far. He’s snapping an ice pack to life and watching with an unmistakable gleam of curiosity as the inner water packet bursts, as if he’s never gotten do that before. Funny.

Suddenly the packet of blue gel is draped over his bulbous ankle, a pale hand guiding it over an abstract mapping of fiery, sweltering bruises, and a barely audible gasp escapes the freckled man at the feeling, a sensation that he can only compare to a snowstorm blanketing over the Atacama. Murphy snickers at the sound, eyes flickering up for a split second as he soothes the firestorm on Bellamy’s skin to catch the look of contentment crossing his face. Instinctively, the other man shoots him a nasty look, if only to relieve himself of the weight of that lightning blue gaze, electrocuting the shit out of his nerves.

“Quit lookin’ at me,” he snaps, and Murphy’s shark-like grin widens.

“M’kay,” the Devil’s apprentice murmurs, sliding off of the stool, and taking the ice pack with him.

_Fucking sadist._

“No- no, _wait_ -” Bellamy’s resolve crumples, and he reaches out pathetically for the pack. Murphy chuckles, rolling his eyes and holding the little blue torture-device over his shoulder like a trophy.

“What, this old thing?”

“Murphy, give me the fucking ice pack,” he growls, and Murphy chews his bottom lip thoughtfully. Bellamy might hate him.

“What’s the magic word?”

Oh, he _definitely_ hates him.

The older man feels the pleasant numbness at the base of his leg fading as Murphy drifts further and further from his reach, smiling the whole goddamn way.

“You’re a terrible fuckin’ nurse, you know that?”

“I was thinking _“please”_ but I applaud your creativity,” he says, and Bellamy can’t decide whether he’s amused or infuriated. A heavy sigh suggesting crumbling resolve slips from his lips, and Murphy’s eyes have taken on a playful gleam.

 _“Please,”_ Bellamy enunciates with excessive clearness, drawing the word out so Murphy knows it doesn’t mean shit to him, “-give me the ice, _yousonofabitch._ ” The boy, nay, demon, finally gives in with a lousy grin, tossing the revered ice pack underhand into Bellamy’s chest, where it makes contact with a soft ‘thump’ and falls into his lap.

He quickly presses it against his ankle, stifles an obscene moan at the sudden relief. “You mind if I take this with me?” Bellamy asks, and Murphy looks up from his workbench, where’s he occupied himself with wiping down the forceps for an umpteenth time, with a lingering smile that immediately begins to fade. His jaw visibly shifts, and the object of his unfaltering stare raises an eyebrow as the question hangs in the air. Murphy averts his eyes back down to his hands, clears his throat roughly.

“You should- uh- you probably shouldn’t walk on that... for a little while,” he instructs, much quieter than normal, but the equally unsure echo of his voice still ricochets around the tin can of a room hauntingly.

Bellamy double-takes. “It’s just a little sore-”

The brunet plants his hands on the table with a frightening sudden air of authority. “Are you the doctor here?” Bellamy reels back slightly, moving to rest against the iron headboard as if pushed by an unexpected wind. And he kind of was.

“Uh, no, but neither are you?”

Murphy blinks, as if taken aback, and then shakes his head, averting his eyes towards the slanted blinds and peering absently through. “You wanna shatter every bone in your leg by walking on a relatively severe case of _talusitis?_ Please, by all means, go for a stroll,” he snaps, face blooming into a myriad of shades of pink as he twists his body away and stares with an increasing intensity through the blinds.

The freckled man peers at the ankle in question, brows contorted by suspicion, but he relents.

Besides, he’s got nothing better to do anyway.

The boy twists the end of the forceps around inside of the dampened rag, a detached look to his usually striking glare.

“Pretty sure they're clean, Murph.”

His head snaps up, almost unnervingly. Jaw tight. Eyes zeroed in like Bellamy’s got a target painted on his forehead. “I’m a thorough guy.”

Even as he tosses an amused look Murphy’s way, an unidentified foreign object lodges itself in the caverns of Bellamy’s gut at the sight of him head-on: under-eyes striped with veins and draped in shadows the color of wine, lips pressed tight, a ghastly pallor-- nearly transparent these days.

“You okay, man?” he says, rearing back as if the boy’s fever-like tremors might develop enough momentum to send a fist flying from his arm and into his skull like a grenade. Murphy blinks.

“Absolutely peachy.” He pauses. “You always talk this much?”

The older man shrugs, not surprised by his company’s bluntness. “You always this weird?”

Murphy’s teeth audibly crack as he bares them behind his lips. “Just ice your fuckin’ elephant ankle and let me do my job, will ‘ya?”

Bellamy raises his hands in surrender, brows shooting up to his hairline as Murphy huffs, a greasy, thick rope of hair falling from the crowd slicked back atop his head, swaying as it brushes across his cheek and ear. He liked the boy’s hair much better when it was soft, loosely framing his face like thin little curtains, so that he’d always have to turn towards Bellamy to look at him (and so Bellamy would always know when he was looking.) Now, he’s either gotten much better at disguising his forlorn glances, born of their earliest, most fiery albeit skewed connection, or Murphy just never looks at him anymore.

And for some reason, that irritates the fuck out of Bellamy.

He liked the Murphy who had nothing else going for him but Bellamy, the Murphy who would’ve touched his very heart to the end of a dagger if Bellamy had simply looked his way. Everyone had likened that Murphy to a murder of crows wrapped in cloudy white skin. But that Murphy was predictable, malleable, secure.

This Murphy, this swirling little firestorm burning against a darkening window, this brass-to-bronze-hearted medical apprentice just across the room-- he was the dangerous one.

This Murphy was a phantom.

As if on queue enter Murphy stage left, out of thin air, ushering a trembling pig-tailed girl over to the examination table and scooping her from the ground by the armpits, with a _‘whoosh’,_ to place her with a click of his tongue _‘plonk’_ onto the cold metal. She smiles, just barely, at the sound effects. Bellamy can’t help but do the same.

He’s across the room again before Bellamy can register it, like a light flare, rifling through a first aid kid and whistling something cheerful and kind of sweet; Bellamy’s guesses he’s elated to be doing something other than obsessing over blindingly-clean instruments.

The older man watches him like he’s a documentary on the mystery of the human psyche, always sliding on another mask- no, entire persona- for what the situation calls for. The medical apprentice dons a mask painted by a faint grin and soft features, tongue peeking through his lips again, as he plasters a bandage over the kid’s scraped knee with utmost precision and gentleness.

“And there we go. Feel okay?” he asks, and the mousy little girl nods. “Good, I thought we were going to have to amputate,” he deadpans, and she blinks at him, joke skimming overhead.

“Forget it. Free to go kid, stay upright.”

“Thanks,” she squeaks, and he takes her by the hand to help her jump down from the table, watching as she wobbles into a run out of the ward and back out into the camp.

The mask melts. He trades it in for a blank one, fraying and the most weary with wear.

Bellamy’s brain starts turning gears again, heart skipping a beat or two.

“Well, well, well. Who would’ve thought?” he teases, deep voice cutting through the thick silence.

Murphy scowls. “What, did you want me to cut off a pigtail? Kick her in the butterfly t-shirt?”

The raven-haired man stifles a smile, tongue in cheek. “No, no. You entertained regardless. Why didn’t you make sound effects for me?”

Murphy’s face splits into an embarrassed sort of grin, but he plays it off by pulling a tight fist from his pocket, making creaking wind-up noises as he turns the invisible handle on his fist until his middle-finger grows to full height. He punctuates the insulting gesture with a _‘ding!’_ and a raise of his thick brows and Bellamy can’t help but fall back on the bed with a chuckle.

He’s missed this.

(He’s missed him?)

An orange glow is filtering in from the windows, sliding across the walls and the floor and Bellamy raises his hands over his head to watch the sunlight slip through the gaps between his fingers, illuminating every freckle dotted generously over caramel skin.

The clanking and bumbling about from Murphy’s end of the room has ceased.

Bellamy lowers his hands to his chest, pushing himself up on an elbow to find the boy staring. Bellamy meets his eyes, sunlight blanketing over the brunet in lemonade stripes, decorating him like a summer candy-cane, and Murphy blinks, eyelids fluttering before he shifts his attention to his own hands. He turns them over in his lap, the light shimmering atop the patches of shiny pink scar tissue marking his knuckles.

Bellamy wonders, with a pang, how many of the things he’s fought off with those battered fists were his fault. He wonders if Murphy knows he still he sees his purple blood streaked across the backs of his hands, if he knows he still sees the torchlight on the cliff-side cutting into Murphy’s swollen eyes, presenting the lacerations of his throat to Bellamy under a spotlight, a museum of his sins fallen to ruins on the ground under his very own hands.

But thou shalt not dwell.

He shakes himself out of the trance. “You get a lot of customers ‘round here?”

Murphy’s still turning his hands over and over in his lap, like the secrets of the universe are supposed to appear somewhere on them any minute now. “Nah,” he says softly, as if he’s forgotten who he is.

_The phantom._

A banner crosses his narrowed eyes, _‘Someone’s talking to you!’_ and the boy looks up, eyes wide. “I mean, not a lot, no.”

Bellamy’s eyes flicker to a deck of cards stacked haphazardly on a cart two beds over. He shifts to the edge of his own bed, before his furnace of an ankle pulsates with a swelling heat to remind him of his position.

“Sounds boring.”

Murphy chuckles, not humorously, and it’s a little off-putting. “No kidding.”

He blurts it out like it’ll burn the inside of his mouth if he keeps it there--“You like cards, Murphy?”

The brunet shrugs. “Christmas cards or post cards?”

Bellamy rolls his eyes, but Murphy interjects before they’ve even come full circle. “’Merry Christmas from the Murphys!’” he whines mockingly, voice startling high and falsely cheerful. “Me, an empty bottle on my left and an Execution Notice on my right. And we’re all smiling.”

Bellamy holds his hands up, fingers bent to form a rectangle, not deterred in the slightest. “We’ll see you soon! Sand, sun and fun. From-- Hell.” He hears a snort, and when he looks up the pale kid is staring back with a dopey, dare-he-say-adoring smile slapped across peach lips, face screwed into something that must be what amusement looks like on Murphy.

The phantom floats across the room, lopsided smile lingering, and gathers the cards into his palms, shuffles over on heavy, untied boots to straddle the end of the bed and drop the pack between them. Bellamy’s foot, leg outstretched and numb, draped in blue ice like a second skin, rests against the inside of Murphy’s thigh, but he doesn’t move away from the ghost of a touch. Bellamy considers it a win, in some strange way.

“You know _Slap Jack?”_

Bellamy knows he knows _Slap Jack._

 _A pack of only thirty-one cards and a flickering lantern on the top floor of the drop ship. They’ve both huffed a little bit of glue from the survival supplies. “My mom used to call it Slap John._ “Let’s play a game,” _she’d slur, and we’d sit at the table with three and a half legs. If we drew a Jack, she’d land a hit on me hard enough to make me forget she was my mother. Or maybe that had happened before we’d even sat down. I can’t remember.”_

He asks anyway.

Murphy nods. “I’ve heard of it.” Jaw rippling, eyes darkening as he flips the first card.

Ace of spades.

Bellamy flips the next.

Seven of hearts.

Three of clubs.

Four of spades.

King of diamonds. Six of clubs. _Nineofclubs._ _Threeofheartsqueenofspadesjackofhearts._

“Jack of hearts!” Bellamy slams a palm on the card, Murphy startling upright and jumping out of his skin, slapping a pale hand atop Bellamy’s with a stupid amount of strength, and the other boy winces. “Jesus, Murphy.”

“No pain, no gain,” he shrugs, pulling his hand away with his eyes trained on the motion, pale fingertips skimming over freckled knuckles underneath them painfully slowly. Bellamy’s heart takes the lead in a sprint race among his organs as he watches, gaze flickering up to match Murphy’s. The kid gives a devilish _Murder of Crows Murphy_ signature grin, hooking a finger around Bellamy’s to lift his hand up off of the card, and he swipes the pile out from underneath.

“Don’t be a creep, Murphy,” Bellamy scolds, and the boy winks- honest to god _winks_ \- releasing Bellamy’s fingers and flipping the next card with a quirk of his brow. Bellamy swallows hard, pulling his hand to his lap, out of Murphy’s reach, and turns another three of hearts as his stomach does the same.

Flip, flip, flip, _flipflipflip **SLAP!** flipflipflip--_

It’s mindless and repetitive, and each time Murphy wins he gives a wide, bright grin and shoves the unwanted pile Bellamy’s way, or takes his hand to wrap it manually around the battered cards, palms always ice cold and soothing on the freckled man’s fiery skin in contrast. Each time Murphy loses, he mutters a vivid, colorful string of curses and bats Bellamy’s hands away from the abused, indignant face of the 19th century knave with a bitten-down smile.

And all that Bellamy has to think about is spades, diamonds, clubs and hearts, and the feeling of Murphy’s frost-coated hands underneath his. Surely Atlas could put the world down for a bit of fun.

Or not.

A flash of golden hair storms in on a fluorescent pathway striped along the floor, looking around the mostly empty ward with narrowed eyes.

“Bellamy, there you are. Kane said you never showed back up for guard duty?”

Murphy’s smile fades in an instant, as if it had never touched his lips at all. He begins brushing the cards into his hands, splayed across the bed between them like a hurricane had blown through only minutes ago.

“Uh- yeah. I’m not supposed to be walking on this,” he mutters, gesturing at the currently average-sized ankle propped up against Murphy’s leg, burnt red with the cold sting of a now-melting ice pack. “Murphy says I’ve got severe _talus-itis.”_

Clarke looks pointedly at Murphy as he removes himself from the bed, avoiding her eyes as he tosses the cards aside and returns to his workbench. She lowers herself to where the echo of him still rests, examining the offending ankle with an accusatory glare and probing fingers.

“Your ankle’s fine. Just a little bruised.”

“Murphy says my leg bones will shatter if I walk on it, though?”

“ _Talusitis_ isn’t real, Bell. You’re fine to walk,” she sighs, glaring at Murphy again. Bellamy looks questioningly at Murphy, twisting his ankle with only a bit of soreness.

Murphy shrugs. “I’m just an apprentice.”

The blonde crosses her arms, closing her gaping mouth and shaking her head back into the right place. “Can you come back to the meeting room with me? We’ve got some 'Code Red' matters to discuss. The others are waiting for us there, so...” she murmurs in a low whisper, and Atlas-- _Bellamy_ nods, picking up the globe from the floor and heaving it back onto his shoulders, sugarplum visions of acid rain and nuclear fallout dancing behind his eyes.

She exits with a flourish, door rattling closed behind her silhouette in the barely-illuminated hallway, and Bellamy approaches the workbench with pocketed hands and a raised brow.

“Sounds pretty important. You should probably get going,” the pale kid murmurs, looking as sickly and solemn as before, curling in on himself again. He’s twisting a rag around the handles of the spotless forceps over and over, as repetitive and natural as breathing. Bellamy takes a chance, reaching an uneasy hand across the table and closing it around his, the rag, and the fucking forceps, stopping him dead in his tracks. Murphy’s eyes ease up to meet his, electric blue sending volts into the other man’s bloodstream-- he’s mainlining lightning.

“You know, if you wanted me to hang out with you, you could have just said so.”

Murphy goes cherry red, snatching his hand away as if electrocuted (Bellamy knows the feeling.) But he puts the forceps aside at last and presses the tops of his fists against the table, rasps out “Just trying to get you fired, Guardsman,” rocking back on his heels, staring hard at a faltering opponent.

(Bellamy imagines surging forward, kissing that stupid mocking grin right off of his pretty mouth, forgetting about the meeting and about the storm and about the end of the world. He imagines letting the insufferable little prick overwhelm his senses and suffocate his darkest thoughts in the way that only Murphy can.)

“Rematch tomorrow?” he says instead.

And Murphy smiles. Weightless, silent, radiant-- supernatural. _A phantom’s smile._

 

And the dying, dying world feels an ounce or two lighter on his shoulders.

 

 

 

_(fin.)_

**Author's Note:**

> [BEAUTIFUL FANART BY deadsatellites !](https://www.instagram.com/p/BaWeurRB2TL/)
> 
> this fic is underwhelming at best i just kind of felt like writing something chill about bellamy drowning in responsibility and murphy losing his shit with isolation and then them bonding and being a little bit gay at the same time so if u liked it: miracle! if u didnt: not surprised but thanks for trying


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